Reclaiming the Blade is a fantastic documentary about sword fighting, and the western tradition of martial arts. But the film explores much deeper subjects, and instead of just telling the story of how swords were made and how they were used in combat, it reminds us of everything else that went with the sword. The experts in the film make the point that far too many movies overlook the greater aspects of sword combat, and that the historical inaccuracy doesn't do justice to the men who gripped the weapon of choice for all cultures and all times before the advancement of the gun. In our age, men don't grip swords, and children grip guns. What a world!

Incredibly, the former prime minister was totally unrepentant over the war, insisting that 9/11 had changed everything and speaking of the “threat” posed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction insisted “you could not take risks with this issue at all.”

But Blair, ever the supporter of devastating wars “just in case,” appeared quite contented with his decision, to the revulsion of the parents of slain soldiers, who sat quietly watching as the crowds outside called for the former prime minister to face war crimes charges.

January 28, 2010

Here is a what a real president would tell the American people and the world in a future State of the Union address.

Madame Speaker, Vice President Paul, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:

We have all struggled through a time of great deception, and have been made to witness haunting immorality by our leaders and system of government. The unforgivable crimes that were committed in the name of liberty and the American people will never be forgotten. We will do future generations of the world a great service by examining where we went wrong as a nation, and how we the people failed most of all. The popular notion that we did not know is a lackluster excuse. Self-deception played a decisive role, one that we cannot evade simply because our institutions and leaders repeatedly lied to us.

Our leaders, in the guise of defenders and patriots, exploited our tragedy and told us that we must give up our rights to save the nation from monsters abroad and barbarians at home, but the only threat to our demise came from them alone. They appealed to our worst prejudices of the other in a time of crisis, and banished reasonable debate on the important issues of the day from public light. And while the White House turned off its lights, our personal flashlights were also missing in action. We too abandoned our most cherished principles and falsely believed that this time we were being told the truth. By policing ourselves we gave our despicable leaders ample opportunity to accomplish what destroyers and oppressors throughout history have always attempted to do, mainly, position themselves beyond approach. And for a long time, they were.

True, our fall into tyranny was not marked by mass troops stamping their feet on Pennsylvania Avenue, but who can rightly deny that the clear signs of a totalitarian order were non-visible? Ask the victims of the American justice system if lawlessness was kept hidden. They will confidently tell you that they faced government charges without any protection of the law; or will show you pictures of their dead family members who were innocently killed off in a criminal aerial campaign sold as an operation against Taliban extremists. You will not be able to look away from them because facts are facts.

And the facts of our nation's crimes will continue to stare us in the face long into the future. Although it is impossible to return to September 10, 2001, or August 5, 1945, it is never too late to apologize for what we have done, and pray that the people of the world will forgive our criminal actions over the course of many years. But our compassion can not end there. We must reconcile with our past and also forgive ourselves, while still realizing that any justification for the crimes committed in our name is a cowardly denial of the truth. The truth is no doubt hard to accept, but a national recovery is not possible without complete acceptance of the truth.

To be sure, nobody possesses the whole truth. Knowing even half takes the most resilient of wills. But there are always exceptions who try harder than the rest. Individuals, empowered with the facts on the ground, can stand against the largest of armies and the cruelest systems of thought control because they can see farther than the twenty-four hour news cycle. For them no opinion is sacred. Blessed with a passion for the truth, they aim for clarity, and don't shrink from criticism or insult. The triumph of truth and reason does not rest on their shoulders, but without their constant appeal to mankind's better instincts, no progress can be made. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers communicated some of the most sublimest thoughts on the conception of existence, truth, and reality in his lectures at the German Academy of Frankfurt in 1937. Near the end of his address on truth he said:

"Reason does not set itself up here as judge, nor does it make any absolute doctrinal pronouncements; but with honesty and fairness it penetrates all reality and allows it to come to light. It does not explain anything away; it does not conceal or oversimplify."

To acknowledge that a few resourceful members in our national establishment knowingly murdered nearly 3,000 innocent citizens on September 11, 2001 in order to thrust the nation into criminal wars of aggression, and that our national media outlets masterfully participated in brainwashing the public, turns the ground on which we stand into vaporizing dust. Everything comes into question. So we must refrain from being too hard on ourselves. Living in a world where truth is defenseless against unthinking bullies and murderous liars is an alienating experience. And for a long time such a state was the case; our society was wrapped up in the abyss of unreason; the chasm between true reality and a makeshift world was daunting for any individual who was at all able to take a glimpse at the disorder without jumping back into his preconditioned ideas of the world and of historical events; it was a period of spiritual disintegration, when authority, as Jaspers understood it, came to be "a mere power in existence without enlivening all the sources of truth." But I am glad that we experienced this great unrest because our country, our people, and our world, is stronger today than at any time in history.

The German Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt recognized the grave psychological impact that organized lying has on the individual mind and society at large, saying: "The experience of a trembling wobbling motion of everything we rely on for our sense of direction and reality is among the most common and most vivid experiences of men under totalitarian rule."

The man who most clearly expressed in the political arena the spiritual agitation that Arendt spoke of was Dr. Paul. On May 19, 2009 he saw what had been done to his country, describing the expansive matrix of lies as an unjust nightmare, and predicted revolutionary changes to come:"Could it all be a bad dream, or a nightmare? Is it my imagination, or have we lost our minds? It's surreal; it's just not believable. A grand absurdity; a great deception, a delusion of momentous proportions; based on preposterous notions; and on ideas whose time should never have come; simplicity grossly distorted and complicated; insanity passed off as logic; grandiose schemes built on falsehoods with the morality of Ponzi and Madoff; evil described as virtue; ignorance pawned off as wisdom; destruction and impoverishment in the name of humanitarianism; violence, the tool of change; preventive wars used as the road to peace; tolerance delivered by government guns; reactionary views in the guise of progress; an empire replacing the Republic; slavery sold as liberty; excellence and virtue traded for mediocracy; socialism to save capitalism; a government out of control, unrestrained by the Constitution, the rule of law, or morality; bickering over petty politics as we collapse into chaos; the philosophy that destroys us is not even defined.

His lifelong dedication to liberty and the restoration of his country constitutes a strong legacy that we can build on for the rest of this century. He set an example to the youth of the world through his undeviating principled stand for the law, and by consistently being his country's conscience in the Congress when the time mattered. In a previous speech he gave on the house floor on June 21, 1999 called "Let liberty ring loudly," the great doctor said:

"For the sake of the future of our Republic, it is important that we are not just consistent, but correctly consistent. We must defend not just the sections of the Constitution we find popular, we must defend the entire Constitution. Most importantly, we must jealously guard the philosophy of freedom upon which it is based. If we do, the sound we will hear is that of liberty once again loudly ringing across our land."

If we had listened to Dr. Paul's judgment earlier we would not have experienced the great and immeasurable suffering that we are still learning to grapple with. It seems history must always be taught the hard way. If we look back on Dr. Paul's words now, we see a part of God trying to teach us, and point us the way. But if it takes tragedy to wake us, then so be it. We are awake now. Let us remember the voices who told us the truth, and carry on in their footsteps. I submit that we build a statue of Dr. Paul in the 9/11 memorial in Washington D.C. A statue, however, will not be enough in the long run. A deep commitment to our moral conscience and the liberty of this great country by every single breathing soul will do the late doctor a much higher honor.

Our Constitution demands that we, public servants, live up to highest ideals of the country every day we are in office. Giving respect in the form of elegant pageantry and words of appreciation is not enough, we must follow its guidelines faithfully, and adhere to its core principles that generations of Americans have fought and died for. To do anything less is impermissible. At best it would constitute failure; at worst, treason.

If the document that is meant to restrict the growth of government is regarded as just a piece of paper by its chief dissemblers then we submit our fate as a nation not to the law of the land but to the gross activities of crooked public officials and their powerful paymasters. Our treasured way of life and the health of our republic is only possible if we vocally and painstakingly resist when our freedoms are threatened. The much lauded claim that what we lose in liberty we gain in security has once again proven to be a fatal lie. All the heartache our country and the world has underwent in these last few years would not have happened if we had remained vigilant to the task of preserving our liberties. To prevent another crisis of authority in the future we as a people must stay true to our founding principles regardless of difficult circumstances because there is nothing more desirable for the illegitimate forces that constantly seek to misdirect our energies than to help create an atmosphere where tradition is broken, and where respect for the sacrifices of previous generations is diminished.

I realize that every word penned two hundred and twenty three years ago is not definitive. What is sacred is the spirit of resistance, without which our founding document would never have been written. We must remember that the Constitution gives evidence to the strength of the Founders' convictions, but also to the imperfection of their final execution. We are blessed with their ever lasting gift - a republic based on laws - just as they were blessed by being alive at the right position and in the right moment in history. But the work of creation is never finished. In every generation new opportunities arise to perfect the original construct, and those few opportunities would not be possible if not for the daring resilience and enduring capacity of every generation that has come before.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of our conscience, believed this nation's destiny laid in the hands of its citizens. And Americans at every critical moment in our history proved Jefferson right by awakening to the sirens of justice well before their leaders. Numerous examples attest to this fact. Before Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation in the midst of the Civil War, it was a citizen and a writer, Henry David Thoreau, who gave a clear indictment of the immoral standing of the law and appealed to every individual to play a role in history by serving his inner conscience. In his prized essay "Civil Disobedience," he wrote: "The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free." Likewise, as President Johnson was intensifying a needless war in Vietnam, it required the work and patience of an outstanding pastor, Martin Luther King Jr, to steer the nation towards a more just equilibrium. In our own time we can learn by the example of Alex Jones, another courageous voice who has stirred the conscience of our people over many years, and whose tireless efforts has allowed me to speak before you tonight.

And so, in the spirit of these men, I ask all Americans, as well as my colleagues on the floor, to take up the call of making sure that this country and this world prevails as a free resting place for all human beings who live on it.

January 27, 2010

World War III is the most iconic event in American culture that never happened. Since the early 1950’s, generations have been preparing for it, writing books about it, producing films and fictional accounts on it, and even playing video games based on it. The concept of another world war is so ingrained into our popular consciousness that it has become almost mythological. It is a legend, a fantasy story of something far away and incomprehensible, often associated with Tim Lahaye novels and action adventure narratives of religious prophecy and Armageddon. World War III has become “entertainment.”

The cartoon-ization of a “last great global conflict” is due to a natural tendency of human beings to cope with terrifying ideas, often by intellectually trivializing them, and thereby making them easily digestible, much like the proverbial public speaking tactic of imagining the audience with their clothes off.

The problem with this development in our society is that it causes us to become cynical to the point of idiocy when confronted with very real threats. By convincing ourselves that such an event is an impossibility we leave ourselves unguarded and without a conceptual point of reference, because we have not thought about the scenario in a practical levelheaded manner. This is akin to a man who has never even considered the likelihood of being mugged on the street, versus a man who has trained in self defense for just such a situation. When the event occurs, the two men will have totally different psychological reactions; the first man utterly surprised and out of his element with little to no constructive response, and the latter man far less mentally phased and thus more likely to survive.

With this fact in mind, we will endeavor to explore recent world events, along with international agreements and tensions, and how they could be used by Global Elites to trigger a war reaching around the planet.

Most Wars Happen To The Benefit Of Globalists

Elites often attempt to paint a pretty picture, a glossy flower filled love-fest, when it comes to the creation of World Government. The truth however has been and always will be that the road to globalization is paved with the death of innocents and civilizations. Every movement towards the formation of centralized global government has been preceded by unthinkable destruction. This may seem futile and horribly regressive to us, but to Globalists, war is a highly effective and useful tool.

Conflict on a massive scale creates an atmosphere of tension and terror, giving the average man, even men who are nowhere near danger, a sort of perpetual tunnel vision. World War has the ability to trigger the “fight or flight” psychological response and sustain it in an entire society over long periods of time. Maintaining such a mental state in a human being can cause severe exhaustion and emotional imbalance. Imagine the process of interrogation and torture used on a prisoner in places such as Guantanamo Bay, then, apply that to an entire nation of people. War breaks down our psychological defenses as a society, and makes us vulnerable to suggestion.

By creating war, Globalists change not only the political landscape of nations, but also the emotional and rational checks and balances of every individual who has not prepared himself to handle the pressures of fear. In this way, people can be made to forget how things were before, and accept a new world, a world designed around the corrupt appetites of elite minorities, if only to make the fear stop.

I often hear arguments that war is simply a product of temporary mass insanity. That it is often a “blunder,” an “oversight.” Make no mistake, governments and the power brokers behind them WANT war. Indeed, they commonly design wars that never would have happened without their help. Here are only a few of the many examples:

January 26, 2010

At one time or another everybody wants the world to end. But when has it ever? People realize it is irrational to plan your life based on a short mood swing but in times of great anxiety careful calculations of the future are tossed out, and common sense thinking becomes rare. Think back to the madness of the Cold War period. Even worse is when governments get crazy and spend society's money to fund expensive doomsday projects. But what's the point of that? If the world is going to end then underground bases aren't going to shelter anybody from the storm for much long. So why not spend that money on useful projects to reduce current suffering and think of solutions that extend beyond a two-year time frame? Running around with our heads on fire when we can jump into a lake is insane.

Why should we allow our behavior to be influenced by an ancient calendar or an ancient book? The world will only end if we choose it to end. And we all have a personal choice to make. You can go hide out in the woods with your guns and shelf food, and wait for the Messiah to come through and fix everything. Or you can take the rebuilding of civilization upon yourself by engaging the political and economic crooks currently in charge, or by growing natural food for your local neighbors, or by doing anything else constructive. One thing is for sure, most people won't be able to continue to live as they've been living, and that may turn out to be an entirely good thing.

It is more likely than not that humanity will grow and prosper in this century. The question is will it be a rising tide that lifts all boats or will people find individual waves to reach the shore? Who knows.

If you want my advice, embrace the apocalypse, and use the changing energy to develop into a full human being, or else these chaotic times may suffocate you into dust.

Although I am reputed to be a cynic, a pessimist, and a bah-humbugger, I am not given to doomsaying in the same way that a growing number of others are. Although I tend to expect, as Thomas Jefferson did, that the natural progress of things will be for liberty to yield and government to gain ground, and for me this will be an unwelcome course of events, I am not much inclined to predict that, especially in the near term, the economy, society, or government will suddenly “break down,” “collapse,” or experience some comparably terrible and complete calamity.

I will admit, however, that some of my friends seem mightily inclined toward such doomsaying. It’s almost as if they can’t wait for the catastrophe to arrive – perhaps because it will demonstrate beyond cavil that the existing order is too corrupt, irrational, and evil to maintain itself. Some people who write or speak along such lines, though, clearly have a vested interest: they are selling something — often precious metals, investment advice, “survival” goods, or “bearish” publications — that they expect to sell more readily to consumers who have acquired a heightened fear of impending economic doom.

Other doomsayers, especially those in the Austro-libertarian camp, may have absorbed their dire expectation from an expression Ludwig von Mises used, “the crack-up boom.” By this term, Mises refers to the penultimate stage of hyperinflation, when each acceleration of the money supply only drives the velocity of expenditure higher as people try to exchange any money they hold for real goods as quickly as possible. The culmination occurs when, as Mises writes in Human Action (p. 427), “The monetary system breaks down; all transactions in the money concerned cease; a panic makes its purchasing power vanish altogether.” Mises was not simply imagining or theorizing about this sort of development, however; he had seen it with his own eyes in Austria and Germany after World War I. And similar crack-ups have occurred in many other places at various times, including the Confederate States of America during the final year or so of the War Between the States.

Austro-libertarians should note, however, that Mises did not argue that a crack-up boom destroys all economic life. Instead, as he immediately explained, “People return either to barter or to the use of another kind of money.” Indeed. Austria, Germany, and the U.S. South did not disappear as a result of their currency’s ruin. Although their people suffered grievously from the destructive effects of hyperinflation, most people found a way to survive, and life went on. Eventually, economic life resumed on a new basis after the adoption of a “reformed” or foreign medium of exchange not subject to such rapid increases in supply. Indeed, some people survived even the recent hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, notwithstanding the Mugabe government’s best efforts to starve most of them.

Not every forecast of economic catastrophe involves hyperinflation, of course. Some breakdowns are expected to grow out of runaway government spending, growing taxation, oppressive regulation, food shortages, fuel shortages, or natural disasters, such as deadly pandemics or lethal changes in the world’s climate. I have yet to encounter a claim that we are all doomed because of an impending beer shortage, but I am a patient man, and I am confident that sooner or later such a scenario will be bruited about.

One aspect that virtually all tales of impending mega-woe have in common is that they end with the catastrophe itself. Bam, crunch, rip, smash, crash: the day of reckoning finally arrives, the dreaded event occurs, and the story ends. Alles ist kaput. Maybe somewhere out there in the woods a few cruelly smirking survivalists remain alive, clutching their beloved firearms and muttering, “I told you so.” If life continues at all, however, it does so only under conditions that leave the survivors solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short of all decent goods and services.

I’m not saying that this sort of thing is impossible. We are talking about human beings and their social interrelations, and from such screwball raw materials, virtually any outcome might conceivably be produced. But such scenarios are dreadfully far-fetched. After all, during the time of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, 30-60 percent of the entire population of Europe died, and hundreds of towns simply disappeared after their inhabitants perished or abandoned them in a futile flight from the incomprehensible killer (inadvertently spreading the disease everywhere they went). Yet Europeans did not die out, and indeed European civilization continued to make slow progress over the long haul, even though the disease became endemic (and episodically epidemic) for centuries.

So, supposing that I accept a horrifying forecast as a point of departure for discussion, my general question for the doomsayers of whatever stripe is: Then what? Do they really believe that when the government can’t pay all the pensions and medical bills that it has promised to pay, life will come to an end? Do they believe that when the government defaults on its debt, the economy will cease to function? Do they believe that when the U.S. dollar loses all of its purchasing power, people will not find a new and better medium of exchange for their transactions? And so forth.

One needs to have – and in saying so I feel almost as if I’m having an out-of-body experience – a modicum of faith in people’s common sense, creativity, and will to survive and prosper, even in the face of great difficulties and obstacles. If people could keep society running in the aftermath of the Black Death, they surely can keep it running after the U.S. government defaults on its debt. I am not saying that no suffering will occur. Vast socio-economic adjustments are painful even in the best of circumstances. But people will find a way, life will go on, and eventually some progress will be attained – before governments once again strangle freedom so severely that another calamity occurs. (After all, I cannot imagine that the people who are building the latest Tower of Babel will ever succeed in reaching heaven.)

Years ago, when I lived in Seattle, I sometimes encountered people who seemed terribly worried that because the Northwest’s old-growth trees were being cut, the so-called Northern Spotted Owl (a bird genetically indistinguishable from the abundant spotted owls in the Rockies, yet somehow imbued with a sacred status) was sure to perish. Try as I might, I could not resist the urge to say to them. “Look, suppose you were a Northern Spotted Owl, and the loggers came along and cut down the tree you were occupying. Would you fall down and die, or would you simply fly to the nearest not-so-old-growth tree and go on living as usual?”

I would be pleased if today’s doomsayers felt an obligation to answer a similar question in regard to their own forecasts.

One of the last remaining Auschwitz survivors has launched a blistering attack on Israel over its occupation of Palestine as he began a lecture tour of Scotland.

Dr Hajo Meyer, 86, who survived 10 months in the Nazi death camp, spoke out as his 10-day tour of the UK and Ireland – taking in three Scottish venues – got under way. His comments sparked a furious reaction from hardline Jewish lobby groups, with Dr Meyer branded an “anti-Semite” and accused of abusing his position as a Holocaust survivor.

Dr Meyer also attended hearings at Edinburgh Sheriff Court on Thursday, where five pro-Palestine campaigners are accused of racially aggravated conduct after disrupting a concert by the Jerusalem Quartet at the city’s Queen’s Hall.

Speaking as his tour got under way, Dr Meyer said there were parallels between the treatment of Jews by Germans in the Second World War and the current treatment of Palestinians by Israelis.

He said: “The Israelis tried to dehumanise the Palestinians, just like the Nazis tried to dehumanise me. Nobody should dehumanise any other and those who try to dehumanise another are not human.

“It may be that Israel is not the most cruel country in the world … but one thing I know for sure is that Israel is the world champion in pretending to be civilised and cultured.”

Dr Meyer was born in 1924 in Bielefeld, Germany. He was not allowed to attend school there after November 1938. He then fled to the Netherlands, alone. In 1944, after a year in the underground, he was caught by the Gestapo and survived 10 months at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

He now lives in the Netherlands, and is the author of three books on Judaism, the Holocaust and Zionism.

Dr Meyer also insisted the definition of “anti-Semitic” had now changed, saying: “Formerly an anti-Semite was somebody who hated Jews because they were Jews and had a Jewish soul. But nowadays an anti-Semite is somebody who is hated by Jews.”

A spokesman for the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, of which Dr Meyer is a member, said criticising Israel was “not the same” as criticising Jews.

Mick Napier, Scottish Palestine ­Solidarity Campaign chairman and one of the five demonstrators facing charges when the court case continues in March, said: “Palestinians are happy to have him as an ally in their cause.

“Hajo knows that Israel has a long history of abusing the tragic history of the Holocaust in order to suppress legitimate criticism of its own crimes.

“Especially since Gaza, people are no longer taken in by their claim that anyone that criticises Israel is anti-Semitic.”

Dr Meyer’s claims met with a furious reaction from pro-Israel groups, who branded him “a disgrace”.

Jonathan Hoffman, co-vice-chairman of the Zionist Federation, said: “I shall be telling him he is abusing his status as a survivor, and I shall be telling him that if Israel had been created 10 years earlier, millions of lives might have been saved.

“Whether he is a survivor or not, to use Nazi comparisons in relation to Israel’s policies is anti-Semitic, unquestionably.”

The tour was cynically timed, Mr Hoffman added, to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27.

Dr Ezra Golombok, Scottish spokesman for the Israel Information Office, accused the anti-zionist lobby of “exploiting” Dr Meyer, who he described as someone “who’s got into a situation he doesn’t understand”.

“This is a propaganda exercise by Mick Napier and his friends, and nothing more. It’s preposterous to compare Israel with Nazi tactics.”

The lecture series, entitled Never Again – For Anyone, continues until January 30.

January 25, 2010

US military obsession with "security" in Haiti and propaganda in the US media about the country's past are raising doubts about the intentions behind the international community's relief efforts in response to the recent tragedy. Once again, a false picture is being reported by so-called journalists to the public about the growing potential for violence in Haiti, and how it will become unstoppable unless there is an increased level of US military presence in the country. But if history is any judge, the US government never deploy its troops to a country for reasons of maintaining law and order or handing out relief packages. Rather, the imperial exploitation and criminal domination of countries by the global elite best explains the speedy actions of the US government and the United Nations in Haiti.

If Haiti was Rwanda the only spotlight on the tragedy would've come a decade from now in a film starring Danny Glover called Hotel Haiti. And my guess is that he would win a sympathy Oscar for directing and acting. But because of Haiti's blood-stained history with the West, its proximity to the United Sates, and its most recent uprisings against the neoliberal/corporate enslavement, the country was treated to the "generosity" and "friendship" of the international community in the wake of its tragic disaster. In other words, the criminal elite is telling the people of Haiti through the US government and the United Nations "get out of the way, or face our guns." And unsurprisingly, the people in America and Canada are looking on clueless, congratulating their governments for reaching the scene so quickly. What they don't realize is that it is a scene of a crime. In "Haiti's tragedy: A crime of US Imperialism," Bill Van Auken writes:

The estimated 200,000 who have died, the quarter million or more injured and the three million whose homes have been destroyed are victims not merely of a natural catastrophe. The lack of infrastructure, the poor quality of construction in Port-au-Prince and the impotence of the Haitian government to organize any response are determining factors in this tragedy.

These social conditions are the product of a protracted relationship between Haiti and the United States, which, ever since US Marines occupied the island nation for nearly 20 years beginning in 1915, has treated the country as a de-facto colonial protectorate.

Forget charity. Charity is easy. What the people of Haiti need from the American government is an apology. For years they have been denied justice and freedom at the hands of the criminal financial elite and the US-UN jackals dressed as peacekeepers. Charity is, of course, important and the heartfelt outpouring of support by the American people and the world's citizens for Haiti will not be forgotten, but there are limits to charity. Charity cannot rebuild a nation. Charity cannot sustain a people after the news reporters turn their lens to another catastrophe. But worst of all is government foreign aid disguised as charity. The history of American foreign aid is a history of imperialist and financial thieves preying on human suffering to achieve criminal ends.

Charitable acts allow people to feel involved without asking the hard questions about why such a tragedy had to be so devastating. The uncomfortable truth is that it didn't. Poor government policies endorsed by the United States and the financial elite created the conditions that made the situation a lot worse than it needed to be. Just as in New Orleans, the lack of strong infrastructure to sustain a natural catastrophe greatly contributed to the high amount of deaths and destruction.

In "Haiti Needs Freedom," Sheldon Richman gives a real solution to the devastating cycle of tyranny that Haiti has undergone throughout its existence as an independent nation:

For Haiti the problem is that centuries of foreign and domestic tyranny have kept individual liberty and free markets from blossoming. The U.S. government played a role in this, with its nearly 20-year occupation (1915–1934) in behalf of sugar interests. But Haiti has suffered under a series of domestic tyrants too, including the brutal Duvaliers, who were backed for a while by the U.S. government as a Caribbean cold-war counterweight to Castro’s Cuba. Even under democracy, Haiti found little relief from corruption and stifling control. It has been the recipient of government-to-government “aid,” but that has not created prosperity; rather it lined the pockets of crooked officials.

Politicians call on people to give money because they're too corrupt to demand justice. While the people, after an onslaught of media coverage, comply without demanding any real commitment from their politicians towards Haiti's interests. And the exploitation is all the more sickening because it has been done all before, and not very long ago, in New Orleans.

In the article, "It's the New Haiti!", Michael Collins compares the aftermath of Haiti's devastation to New Orleans and how it will most likely be transformed for the interests of a criminal corporate class who always seem to be waiting in the wings when disaster strikes like a band of vultures. Collins writes:

The most important similarities between New Orleans and Haiti are ethnicity and class based. In New Orleans, the majority of damage occurred in black, largely poor districts of the city. In Haiti, the entire nation is both black and, for the most part, living in poverty.

But Haiti’s divergence from the New Orleans story line is significant. It represents an entire nation, a huge, strategically placed land mass just waiting for the type of rehabilitation that New Orleans only dreamed about. And to the rescuers must have big plans.

And the rescuers also have big news cameras that show the picture but don't tell a story. Too many people think "100, 000 deaths" is a news story. It is not. It is a headline meant to attract viewers. A story needs historical background, not a blank screen; witnesses before the disaster, not just victims of the disaster; objective historians, not paid analysts; field reporters who dig through the rubble of information, not journalists carrying babies around; and most of all a story needs actors. Was Haiti's destiny solely controlled by its people before the earthquake or were there other participants who desired to influence the country? The US mainstream media has not told a story about the Haitian tragedy, instead, they have shown the reality of the earthquake's victims through officialdom's lens, and in some cases even made up reality to push an agenda. Rebecca Solnit says that the media becomes over zealous when covering natural disasters and portray a picture that contributes to panic and fear-mongering, practices that eventually lead to the needless loss of lives through the course of the disaster. In her article, "When the Media Is the Disaster," she highlights the phenomenon of looting and how it is carelessly over-exaggerated by the media in times of crises:

Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: “Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince.” It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

A third image was captioned: “A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store.” Yet another: “The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter.”

People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who’d survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn’t arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual “objective” roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.

The “looter” in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn’t the most urgent problem. The “looter” stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.

The pictures do convey desperation, but they don’t convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer -- his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.

The most outrageous idea about Haiti's misfortunes that has gained ground even in circles beyond Pat Robertson is that Haiti is responsible for its recurrent state of poverty and desolation. Without Western aid, these commentators tell us, Haiti would still be a nation of savages. If this idea continues to go unchallenged by President Obama and other leaders of the West then it will legitimize two centuries of oppression and Western injustice. If the country is left to men like Clinton and Bush, then Haiti could very well face a new phase of slavery under the cover of "economic development."

Even today, after two and half centuries of revolutions, some people still uncritically accept the lie that fate rules nations, and that the natural progression of humanity is the current course of technocratic development that is taking place all around the world, which leaves out human freedom and most of all, independent political action. But it is not fate that Haiti is under siege. It is not fate that men and women today have to walk through naked body scanners at airports. It is the policy of a few criminal men. It is politics. As Theodor Adorno said; "The concept of fate, which subjects men to blind domination, reflects the domination exercised by men," (Prisms, 70). The world is not ruled by fate but by sheer political will. And the people of the world possess a greater power to exercise their will than a criminal elite. So we must turn to politics, not charity, if we truly want the people of Haiti to live under better, and freer conditions.

January 24, 2010

The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.- George Washington

"I don't want confrontation," says Gary Fielder, a criminal and constitutional attorney from Denver, Colorado, as he sits on a bench in a courthouse, and waits for the authorities to question him about why he isn't going through the naked body scanner like everyone else. His sentiment is shared by a lot of people. Nobody wants a confrontation, but if it takes confrontation to take back our privacy rights that were once deemed sacred and off limits by the government then so be it. A little confrontation now and then is a healthy thing in a democracy. Without confrontation, America wouldn't exist. In 1776 a clear line was drawn. And once again the time has come for free human beings in America to draw the line between the state and the citizen.

The United States was created upon the premise that a free society should not and ultimately can not be ruled by an individual king or queen. After we won the Revolutionary War, Ben Franklin, John Adams and John Jay negotiated the Treaty of Peace in Paris, France, wherein the sovereignty of King George III devolved to the established states.

However, as John Jay later explained as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, the sovereignty of the king was not bestowed upon the governments of those states, but to its people.

Accordingly, the People held, and still hold, the sovereignty. The sovereignty held by the People is the absolute power source, as if held by a monarch.

That means: The people are sovereign. Each individual person on the land at that time, paupers, vagabonds and fugitives excepted, became a sovereign--not a king or queen, but a sovereign with all the privileges and immunities of a sovereign according to the Law of Nations. This “sovereignty” was passed on to the original People’s posterity, through the Constitution of the United States.

You may be sovereign and not even know it.

Do you feel like a sovereign? Probably not. No, you probably feel like the slave the government that your ancestors created turned you into.

Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: “Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince.” It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

A third image was captioned: “A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store.” Yet another: “The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter.”

People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who’d survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn’t arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual “objective” roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.

The “looter” in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn’t the most urgent problem. The “looter” stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.

The pictures do convey desperation, but they don’t convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer -- his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.

In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I’ve seen I’m not convinced.

What Would You Do?

Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your pockets days ago. Your credit cards are meaningless because there is no longer any power to run credit-card charges. Actually, there are no longer any storekeepers, any banks, any commerce, or much of anything to buy. The economy has ceased to exist.

By day three, you’re pretty hungry and the water you grabbed on your way out of your house is gone. The thirst is far worse than the hunger. You can go for many days without food, but not water. And in the improvised encampment you settle in, there is an old man near you who seems on the edge of death. He no longer responds when you try to reassure him that this ordeal will surely end. Toddlers are now crying constantly, and their mothers infinitely stressed and distressed.

So you go out to see if any relief organization has finally arrived to distribute anything, only to realize that there are a million others like you stranded with nothing, and there isn’t likely to be anywhere near enough aid anytime soon. The guy with the corner store has already given away all his goods to the neighbors. That supply’s long gone by now. No wonder, when you see the chain pharmacy with the shattered windows or the supermarket, you don’t think twice before grabbing a box of PowerBars and a few gallons of water that might keep you alive and help you save a few lives as well.

The old man might not die, the babies might stop their squalling, and the mothers might lose that look on their faces. Other people are calmly wandering in and helping themselves, too. Maybe they’re people like you, and that gallon of milk the fellow near you has taken is going to spoil soon anyway. You haven’t shoplifted since you were 14, and you have plenty of money to your name. But it doesn’t mean anything now.

If you grab that stuff are you a criminal? Should you end up lying in the dirt on your stomach with a cop tying your hands behind your back? Should you end up labeled a looter in the international media? Should you be shot down in the street, since the overreaction in disaster, almost any disaster, often includes the imposition of the death penalty without benefit of trial for suspected minor property crimes?

Or are you a rescuer? Is the survival of disaster victims more important than the preservation of everyday property relations? Is that chain pharmacy more vulnerable, more a victim, more in need of help from the National Guard than you are, or those crying kids, or the thousands still trapped in buildings and soon to die?

It’s pretty obvious what my answers to these questions are, but it isn’t obvious to the mass media. And in disaster after disaster, at least since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. Or they get gunned down for minor thefts or imagined thefts. The media not only endorses such outcomes, but regularly, repeatedly, helps prepare the way for, and then eggs on, such a reaction.

If Words Could Kill

We need to banish the word “looting” from the English language. It incites madness and obscures realities.

“Loot,” the noun and the verb, is a word of Hindi origin meaning the spoils of war or other goods seized roughly. As historian Peter Linebaugh points out, “At one time loot was the soldier's pay.” It entered the English language as a good deal of loot from India entered the English economy, both in soldiers’ pockets and as imperial seizures.

After years of interviewing survivors of disasters, and reading first-hand accounts and sociological studies from such disasters as the London Blitz and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, I don’t believe in looting. Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone in the kind of desperate circumstances I outlined above, takes necessary supplies to sustain human life in the absence of any alternative. Not only would I not call that looting, I wouldn’t even call that theft.

Necessity is a defense for breaking the law in the United States and other countries, though it’s usually applied more to, say, confiscating the car keys of a drunk driver than feeding hungry children. Taking things you don’t need is theft under any circumstances. It is, says the disaster sociologist Enrico Quarantelli, who has been studying the subject for more than half a century, vanishingly rare in most disasters.

Personal gain is the last thing most people are thinking about in the aftermath of a disaster. In that phase, the survivors are almost invariably more altruistic and less attached to their own property, less concerned with the long-term questions of acquisition, status, wealth, and security, than just about anyone not in such situations imagines possible. (The best accounts from Haiti of how people with next to nothing have patiently tried to share the little they have and support those in even worse shape than them only emphasize this disaster reality.) Crime often drops in the wake of a disaster.

The media are another matter. They tend to arrive obsessed with property (and the headlines that assaults on property can make). Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.

They also deploy the word panic wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of “stampedes.” Do they think Haitians are cattle?

The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control -- the American military calls it “security” -- rather than relief. A British-accented voiceover on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a "stampede" and adds that this delivery “risks sparking chaos.” The chaos already exists, and you can’t blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they’re unworthy and untrustworthy.

Back to looting: of course you can consider Haiti’s dire poverty and failed institutions a long-term disaster that changes the rules of the game. There might be people who are not only interested in taking the things they need to survive in the next few days, but things they’ve never been entitled to own or things they may need next month. Technically that’s theft, but I’m not particularly surprised or distressed by it; the distressing thing is that even before the terrible quake they led lives of deprivation and desperation.

In ordinary times, minor theft is often considered a misdemeanor. No one is harmed. Unchecked, minor thefts could perhaps lead to an environment in which there were more thefts and so forth, and a good argument can be made that, in such a case, the tide needs to be stemmed. But it’s not particularly significant in a landscape of terrible suffering and mass death.

A number of radio hosts and other media personnel are still upset that people apparently took TVs after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. Since I started thinking about, and talking to people about, disaster aftermaths I’ve heard a lot about those damned TVs. Now, which matters more to you, televisions or human life? People were dying on rooftops and in overheated attics and freeway overpasses, they were stranded in all kinds of hideous circumstances on the Gulf Coast in 2005 when the mainstream media began to obsess about looting, and the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana made the decision to focus on protecting property, not human life.

A gang of white men on the other side of the river from New Orleans got so worked up about property crimes that they decided to take the law into their own hands and began shooting. They seem to have considered all black men criminals and thieves and shot a number of them. Some apparently died; there were bodies bloating in the September sun far from the region of the floods; one good man trying to evacuate the ruined city barely survived; and the media looked away. It took me months of nagging to even get the story covered. This vigilante gang claimed to be protecting property, though its members never demonstrated that their property was threatened. They boasted of killing black men. And they shared values with the mainstream media and the Louisiana powers that be.

Somehow, when the Bush administration subcontracted emergency services -- like providing evacuation buses in Hurricane Katrina -- to cronies who profited even while providing incompetent, overpriced, and much delayed service at the moment of greatest urgency, we didn’t label that looting.

Or when a lot of wealthy Wall Street brokers decide to tinker with a basic human need like housing…. Well, you catch my drift.

Woody Guthrie once sang that “some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” The guys with the six guns (or machetes or sharpened sticks) make for better photographs, and the guys with the fountain pens not only don’t end up in jail, they end up in McMansions with four-car garages and, sometimes, in elected -- or appointed -- office.

Learning to See in Crises

Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: “The point I'm making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one.”

The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn’t help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it’s bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England’s green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.

Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud. Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse -- food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment -- might not be “violence,” or “looting,” or “law-breaking.” It might be logic. It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.

Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don’t have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.

Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them. I’d like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:

Let’s start with the picture of the policeman hogtying the figure whose face is so anguished: “Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti’s starving millions.”

And the guy with the bolt of fabric? “As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti.”

For the murdered policeman: “Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings.”

And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: “Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world.”

That one might not be totally accurate, but it’s likely to be more accurate than the existing label. And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.

FOREWORD: At certain times, focusing on the big picture is important not just for investment success, but for personal welfare, and even survival. We believe such times are here. It is estimated that 98% of Americans have never held a gold coin in their hands. Yet 100% of Americans regularly handle Federal Reserve Notes. From a contrarian standpoint, the financial message from those two statistics is clear. Even so, gold is much more than money or an investment medium; it stands for liberty and throughout history has facilitated escape and ensured freedom. Never having touched a gold coin is the monetary equivalent to never having breathed fresh air, felt the warmth of sunshine, looked up at the stars or risen from the gutter. Fiat Federal Reserve Notes are becoming nothing more than sewage decomposing in the vast, toxic septic tank of predatory Washington politics, epic Federal Reserve arrogance and error, blatant Wall Street fraud and outright Master Class plunder. Below, we outline America’s troubling and compounding predicament, and urge you to think about how to protect yourself from its consequences, both financially and personally.

Thanks to the endless barrage of feel-good propaganda that daily assaults the American mind, best epitomized a few months ago by the “green shoots,” everything’s-coming-up-roses propaganda touted by Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, the citizens have no idea how disastrous the country’s fiscal, monetary and economic problems truly are. Nor do they perceive the rapidly increasing risk of a totalitarian nightmare descending upon the American Republic.

One stark and sobering way to frame the crisis is this: if the United States government were to nationalize (in other words, steal) every penny of private wealth accumulated by America’s citizens since the nation’s founding 235 years ago, the government would remain totally bankrupt.

According to the Federal Reserve’s most recent report on wealth, America’s private net worth was $53.4 trillion as of September, 2009. But at the same time, America’s debt and unfunded liabilities totaled at least $120,000,000,000,000.00 ($120 trillion), or 225% of the citizens’ net worth. Even if the government expropriated every dollar of private wealth in the nation, it would still have a deficit of $66,600,000,000,000.00 ($66.6 trillion), equal to $214,286.00 for every man, woman and child in America and roughly 500% of GDP. If the government does not directly seize the nation’s private wealth, then it will require $389,610 from each and every citizen to balance the country’s books. State, county and municipal debts and deficits are additional, already elephantine in many states (e.g., California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York) and growing at an alarming rate nationwide. In addition to the federal government, dozens of states are already bankrupt and sinking deeper into the morass every day.

The government continues to dig a deeper and deeper fiscal grave in which to bury its citizens. This year, the federal deficit will total at least $1,600,000,000,000.00 ($1.6 trillion), which represents overspending of $4,383,561,600.00 ($4.38 billion) per day. (The deficit during October and November, 2009, the first two months of Fiscal Year 2010, totaled $296,700,000,000.00 ($297 billion), or $4,863,934,000.00 ($4.9 billion) per day, a record.) Using the GAAP accounting method (which is what corporations are required to use because it presents a far more accurate and honest picture of a company’s finances than the cash accounting method primarily and misleadingly used by the U.S. government), the nation’s fiscal year 2009 deficit was roughly $9,000,000,000,000.00 ($9 trillion), or $24,700,000,000.00 ($24.7 billion) per day, as calculated by brilliant and well-respected economist John Williams. (www.shadowstats.com) Fiscal Year 2010’s cash- and GAAP-accounting deficits will likely be worse than 2009’s, given government bailout and new program spending that is on steroids and psychotic.

Putting Fiscal Year 2009’s $9,000,000,000,000.00 ($9 trillion) deficit another way, 17% of America’s private wealth, accumulated over a period of 235 years, was wiped out by just one year’s worth of government deficit spending insanity.

Given this, is it any surprise that Treasury Secretary Geithner has announced that the release of the nation’s FY 2009 supplemental GAAP financial statements has been delayed? Remember, this is the same Secretary Geithner who bullied people to cover up the sordid details of the AIG, or more accurately, the taxpayer-funded, multi-billion dollar, Santa Claus bailout and bonus bonanza for Goldman Sachs. Do you really think this government, characterized as it is by fiscal and monetary secrecy, lies, chicanery, cronyism and stonewalling, wants the people to know what is actually happening? Obviously, it does not, so it hides from the public the inexcusable facts.

(Salon) - One of the most intense controversies of the Bush years was the administration's indefinite imprisoning of "War on Terror" detainees without charges of any kind. So absolute was the consensus among progressives and Democrats against this policy that a well-worn slogan was invented to object: a "legal black hole." Liberal editorial pages routinely cited the refusal to charge the detainees -- not the interrogation practices there -- in order to brand the camp a "dungeon," a "gulag," a "tropical purgatory," and a "black-hole embarrassment." As late as 2007, Democratic Senators like Pat Leahy, on the floor of the Senate, cited the due-process-free imprisonments to rail against Guantanamo as "a national disgrace, an international embarrassment to us and to our ideals, and a festering threat to our security," as well as "a legal black hole that dishonors our principles." Leahy echoed the Democratic consensus when he said:

The Administration consistently insists that these detainees pose a threat to the safety of Americans. Vice President Cheney said that the other day. If that is true, there must be credible evidence to support it. If there is such evidence, then they should prosecute these people.

Leahy also insisted that the Constitution assigns the power to regulate detentions to Congress, not the President, and thus cited Bush's refusal to seek Congressional authorization for these detentions as a prime example of Bush's abuse of executive power and shredding of the Constitution.

But all year along, Barack Obama -- even as he called for the closing of Guantanamo -- has been strongly implying that he will retain George Bush's due-process-free system by continuing to imprison detainees without charges of any kind. In his May "civil liberties" speech cynically delivered at the National Archives in front of the U.S. Constitution, Obama announced that he would seek from Congress a law authorizing and governing the President's power to imprison detainees indefinitely and without charges. But in September, the administration announced he changed his mind: rather than seek a law authorizing these detentions, he would instead simply claim that Congress already "implicitly" authorized these powers when it enacted the 2001 AUMF against Al Qaeda -- thereby, as The New York Times put it, "adopting one of the arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about detention policies."

The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba because a high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release, an administration official said on Thursday.

The Washington Post says that these decisions "represent the first time that the administration has clarified how many detainees it considers too dangerous to release but unprosecutable because officials fear trials could compromise intelligence-gathering and because detainees could challenge evidence obtained through coercion." Once that rationale is accepted, it necessarily applies not only to past detainees but future ones as well: the administration is claiming the power to imprison whomever it wants without charges whenever it believes that -- even in the face of the horrendously broad "material support for terrorism" laws the Congress has enacted -- it cannot prove in any tribunal that the individual has actually done anything wrong. They are simply decreed by presidential fiat to be "too dangerous to release." Perhaps worst of all, it converts what was once a leading prong in the radical Bush/Cheney assault on the Constitution -- the Presidential power to indefinitely imprison people without charges -- into complete bipartisan consensus, permanently removed from the realm of establishment controversy.

There are roughly 200 prisoners left at the camp, which means roughly 25% will be held without any charges at all. Using the administration's perverse multi-tiered justice system, the rest will either be tried in a real court, sent to a military commission or released. What this means, among other things, is that the President's long-touted policy of closing Guantanamo is a total sham: the essence of that "legal black hole" -- indefinite detention without charges -- will remain fully in place, perhaps ludicrously and dangerously shifted to a different locale (onto U.S. soil) but otherwise fully in tact. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the Military Commissions Act unconstitutionally denied the right of habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees -- a principle the Obama administration has vigorously resisted when it comes to Bagram detainees -- but mere habeas corpus review does not come close to a real trial, which the Bill of Rights guarantees to all "persons" (not only "Americans") before the State can keep them locked in a cage.

Numerous Democrats have spent the year justifying Obama's desire for indefinite detention with dubious excuses that would have been unthinkable to hear from them during the Bush years. I addressed all of those excuses in full back in May, here. As but one example, the claim most commonly cited to justify Obama's actions -- these detainees can't be convicted because the evidence against them is "tainted" by torture -- is: (a) completely unproven; (b) completely immoral (it's one of the longest-standing principles of Western justice that tortured-obtained evidence can't be used to justify imprisonment); and (c) completely contradictory (Democrats spent years claiming, and still do, that torture doesn't work and produces unreliable evidence; if that's true, who could possibly justify indefinitely imprisoning someone based on torture-obtained -- i.e., inherently unreliable -- evidence?). Whatever else is true, both Obama's policy and the rationale -- we must imprison Terrorists without charges because there's no evidence to convict them but they're somehow still deemed too dangerous to release -- is exactly what the Bush/Cheney faction endlessly repeated to justify its "legal black hole."

But no matter. If there's one thing we've seen repeatedly all year long, it's that many Democrats simply do not believe in the axiom best expressed by The New York Times' Bob Herbert when he said that "Americans should recoil as one against the idea of preventive detention." As Herbert wrote: "policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House." That precept should be too self-evident to require expression and yet is widely rejected. Hence, exactly that which very recently was condemned as "a dungeon, a gulag, a tropical purgatory, and a black-hole embarrassment" is now magically transformed into a beacon of sober pragmatism from a man -- a Constitutional Scholar -- solemnly devoted to restoring America's Standing and Values.

* * * * *

Yesterday, prior to this decision being announced, I conducted a 20-minute interview with ACLU Exeuctive Director Anthony Romero regarding that group's newly released report on Obama's civil liberites record after the first year in office, pointedly entitled: "America Unrestored." I'll post that discussion later today. Additionally, I will have an analysis of the Supreme Court's obviously momentous decision in Citizens United -- invaliding restrictions on corporate and union election spending -- posted later.

UPDATE: Just to add some thick irony to all of this, today is the one-year anniversary of President Obama's Executive Order to close Guantanamo within one year -- an anniversary the administration decided to celebrate not by fulfilling its terms, but instead by announcing that the central feature of Guanatanamo -- indefinite detention with no charges -- will continue indefinitely.

January 22, 2010

That a country could produce George H.W Bush and Ron Paul in the same generation is an astounding truth about the nature of liberty, and how it can give fruit to both good and bad men. So keep your spirits up, because there is hope whenever men become successful in fighting for their country like Ron Paul and Alex Jones.

Ron Paul Warns Of Coming "Social And Political Chaos"Congressman delivers timely State Of The Republic address

Texas Congressman Ron Paul has delivered a riveting "State of The Republic" address on his Campaign for Liberty website, orating his thoughts on where the U.S. stands as a nation and what the future holds.

Paul warns that if the country continues along the course it is on, we will witness a three stage slide into social and political chaos, beginning with the current financial crisis, a coming dollar crisis, and culminating in mass unrest.

"Reality is setting in," the Congressman urges, adding that the only way to prevent social breakdown is to embrace liberty and self reliance and reject the nanny state and government dependency.

"We are rapidly moving toward a dangerous time in our history. Society as we know it is vulnerable to political and social unrest. This impending crisis comes as a consequence of our flawed foreign and domestic economic policies, a silly notion of money, ignorance about central banking, ignoring the onerous power and mischief of out of control intelligence agencies, our unsustainable welfare state and a willingness to sacrifice privacy and civil liberties in an attempt to achieve safety and security from an inept government."

"Dangerous times indeed." The Congressman states, stressing that a street fight to restore liberty is not a good option.

"The only way that we can prevent blood from running in the streets is to offer a better idea of the proper role of government in a society that desires, first and foremost, liberty."

"The social unrest will illicit cries for the government to exert unusual force to head off a complete breakdown of law and order. The ultimate trap will be set for a system of government claiming to protect a free society." Paul states.

"If more power and police authority are not given to the Federal government, it will be argued that only anarchy will result. If more government policing power is given, it will mean a lethal threat to civil liberties."

The Congressman also warns that it is naive to assume that the American people will not be the eventual target of draconian laws and restrictions already introduced in the wake of 9/11.

"Our civil leaders will not be hesitant to use these powers to maintain order, tragically, the people may even demand it," he says.

The Congressman elegantly lays out the intricacies of the financial crisis and its history, specifically pointing the finger of blame at the Fed and in particular Ben Bernanke, referring to the crisis as Bernanke's "very risky experiment with the health of our country and the wealth of our economy."

"The worldwide financial system built on a foundation of paper has received the shockwaves of an impending collapse. The wild speculation in the derivatives market, the stock market bubble, the insurmountable debt, public and private, and the massive malinvestments have been shattered."

Paul points out that doubling the money supply can hardly be a solution to a problem stemming from the creation of excess credit.

"It wouldn't make much sense for a doctor taking care of a very sick patient from severe infection, to deliberately give the patient another infection - yet that is what the PhD doctors are doing to our very sick economy."

"The only solution so far offered has been to print more money faster, keep interest rates low, at practically 0%, and remove all stops for controlling deficits. These are the very policies that caused the disequalibrium, and doing more of the same, but only faster, can hardly help our economy." Paul comments.

"When it is revealed that the insider friends of the Fed and Congress get billions of dollars in bailout at the expense of the middle class, it's no wonder the people are taking to the streets and directing their hostilities towards both Republicans and Democrats in Washington."